Best known on an international level for helming 2001’s “Sex and Lucia”, writer/director Julio Medem’s latest, simply titled “8”, is a Spanish historical drama that spans a 90-year period and is built around eight sequences. The story follows two characters across time and space, much as Medem did in his 1998 film “Lovers of the Arctic Circle”, as they gradually cross paths and a love story develops. The film premiered in Spain during last year’s Málaga Film Festival and made its way to Chicago for the 42nd Chicago Latino Film Festival (CLFF).

The plot of Medem’s story begins on April 14th, 1931, when the film’s main characters, Octavio and Adela, were born, with each family on opposite sides of a divided country.  Octavio’s family was on the side of Francisco Franco, a Spanish general who ruled Spain as a authoritatian military dictator for 36 years, from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975. Adela is the daughter of a Republican schoolteacher, who would eventually be killed by a firing squad when she was a little girl. We see the lives of Octavio and Adela become intertwined with historic events that impact their families in unforgettable ways.

Medem divides the decades-spanning narrative into eight parts, a storytelling choice that accentuates the sense of fluidity and inevitability in the protagonists’ story. He also incorporates mirages and reflections to visually reinforce the idea that memory is neither linear nor objective, but rather an ambiguous territory where reality and perception merge. Some of these scenes are shot in vivid black-and-white, especially in the earlier decades, with color gradually added as the modern era approaches. Medem also handles editing duties, while the cinematographer Rafa Reparaz handles photography. Much of Reparaz’s style involves swirling camerawork that moves around characters, a choice that often feels overused throughout the film.

At times, it’s a challenge to keep track of who’s who, not because Medem’s screenplay is complicated, but because the history presented is vague. Sure, viewers well-versed in Spain’s history shouldn’t have any problems following along, but even some characters, especially the men, start to look and behave quite similarly. For a story that has an overall simple and overexplained feel to it, it shouldn’t be this hard to figure out what happened to which characters. Medem also attempts to draw a comparison to the country’s Civil War and a historic  Barca-Madrid match, and that obvious simplification robs the story of any nuance or subtlety.

About halfway through the story, we see Octavio and Adela as adults, played by Javier Rey and Ana Rujas, respectively, and once their connection is established, it becomes a little easier to connect their histories with the present we find them in. That being said, their romance and love story isn’t all that convincing, and could’ve either happened sooner or perhaps had taken over most of the film’s story.

While Medem has made an ambitious attempt to offer a compelling story spanning decades, the heart of the story has been sidelined by this approach. The title “8” winds up not only referring to the characters’ narrative structure, but also acts as a symbol: an infinity symbol, evoking the cyclical nature of history and memory.

RATING: **